This month
marks the
first anniversary
of Seajure, the
Seattle Clojure group. I've had a lot of fun conducting these
meetings. It sounds like our group is a little different from the
way most people run things, so I thought I'd write a bit about
what has worked for us.

One thing I knew I wanted from the start was for meetings to be
very code-centric. The Seattle Ruby group used to have talks
regularly, and they found that in that kind of situation after a
few months things usually fall into patterns of just having the
same person present over and over.

So we focus on code instead. We try to come up with a small
project that's somewhat useful on its own but not too ambitious to
build in a couple hours. Everyone logs into a shared tmux session
running Emacs and can all collaborate on the code as it's being
written. Of course still only one person can type at a time, but
it's a lot less hassle than having to set up a projector, and it's
much more interactive.

This only really works because we have a small group; with larger
attendance levels the group may need to be divided somehow. We
have swarm-coding sessions for only about half of our meetings
when we have a good idea for a project. Other times we'll just
discuss new features of Clojure or specific tools; one meeting we
had an Emacs workshop to get people started. We also spend about
half an hour starting out just chatting and making sure everyone
has been introduced.

Normally I stress the importance of keeping the same location
consistently since people have an easier time planning for it if
it doesn't shift around, but the
coffee shop in which we hold our meetings is closing early for
winter hours, so we're in the University
District Trabant for our
March meeting. If you're in the Seattle area, join
the join the
mailing list and come on by!